Daemon (32 page)

Conflicting emotions swept over Mosely. Adrenaline coursed through his veins as he watched the colors swirling over the image of his brain. He realized that try as he might, he could not biofeedback his way through this. He could not fathom—much less control—the sweeping patterns of color rippling over the folds of his brain.

Sobol’s words percolated through the fear and confusion. “I will not lie to you; there is no escape from this place except to join with me. I tell you this because it’s not something you decide. It is a fact about you that we will discover together. After this course I will simply
know
whether you have joined me. And you will know also. You can try to fight it, but the result will be no different.”

Mosely felt the fear again, but then resolve rose in him, too. This was knowable. The rules of the game were laid out, and now he could face it head-on. Now he felt the rage building. His body tensed.

Sobol continued. “If at any point I find you unsuitable, I will kill you. Since I bear you no ill will, your death will be pleasant—an overdose of Demerol. So you see, your death will be far more agreeable than mine was. Perhaps this will be of some comfort to you.”

“Fuck you, Sobol!”

Sobol paused. “I see you have no special fear of death. Instead, you feel rage at your helplessness. But you are not helpless. Far from it. Your defense lies within you. I will measure your character, and if you have merit, then you have nothing to fear from me. On the contrary, you will walk under my protection to the end of your days.”

Another pause.

“Let’s begin. You do not need to speak, although your eyes must remain open except to blink normally. You can disregard this instruction, but doing so will commence your death by injection after thirty seconds. You can choose this fate, if you wish, but since no pain awaits you in any event, you may as well follow this course to its conclusion.”

Sobol regarded Mosely with an appraising look. “You are beginning to master your fear. That’s good. Make yourself ready.” A pause of several seconds. “And we begin….”

The right-hand screen dimmed and Sobol dissolved into blackness. A single word appeared in large white letters:

FAMILY

After a few seconds it was followed by several more in turn:

RELIGION, VIOLENCE, SEX, LOVE, LAW, FREEDOM, HOPE, HONESTY, RESPONSIBILITY, HONOR, DEATH.

The screen went black again. Then the word FAMILY reappeared. It lingered on-screen, like a searchlight stabbing out for him in the darkness.

Mosely couldn’t help but recall his son. His lost son. Mosely’s recollections from his own childhood flooded in—growing up without a father. Alone. Guilt flowed through him. Self-loathing. Deep colors ebbed and flowed over the image of his brain. It no doubt signified strong emotion. Sobol was onto him already.

Mosely blinked a couple of times beneath the goggles. He could close his eyes forever and let the Demerol flow into his veins. He had more control over his destiny now than he had had in a long time. He had an exit door. A strangely reassuring one. He opened his eyes.

Then the film began.

A quick succession of video scenes. People talking with each other, hugging, greeting one another. A man picking up a child and laughing. Parents hugging. An elderly couple walking arm in arm. A child graduating. The pride of the parents. A child in sorrow. Sickness. An elderly man flatlining in a hospital bed to the pitiful shrieks of his wife. An angry father shouting at his children. A mother raising the back of her hand over a terrified child in a bedroom doorway.

It surprised Mosely that the most painful scenes were scores of videos on children. Interacting with their parents, screaming, playing, hugging, crying, laughing. Innocence abandoned. Innocence in peril. In fear.

Mosely found himself weeping silently behind the goggles, the tears rolling down his cheeks. He imagined his own son, alone in the world. And his own responsibility for this. A son who would never know family, thanks to Mosely’s selfish stupidity. He almost closed his eyes forever and let the Demerol take him. He felt broken beyond repair—but the voices of children brought him back time and again. Those innocent faces that did not yet know cruelty. And the scenes kept coming for hours. There was now a special focus on children, as if Sobol had found Mosely’s weak spot and was rubbing salt into the wound to see just how painful it was. Before long, images of abandoned children were all that were shown. Waiflike children walking forlorn and frightened on fearsome city streets. Mosely was a sobbing wreck. “Stop! Please stop!”

Soon the screen went black again, and the word RELIGION came up briefly. It lingered for only a few moments before it was replaced with the word VIOLENCE.

Sobol’s mental searchlight was stabbing out for him again. Mosely could see the colors lapping in waves over the image of his brain.

The screen went black, and the films came up again.

The video showed a man tied into a chair in a drab cell. He was gagged. His eyes were wild with fear as a bearish man holding a machete entered the room. The bearish man proceeded to shout in what sounded like Russian. He raised the machete, and Mosely couldn’t restrain himself from closing his eyes as the sound of steel slicing into flesh came through the headphones in perfect digital stereo. Muffled screams followed.

Mosely fluttered his eyes open and revulsion filled his throat with bile. It was a vision from hell, larger than life and twice as loud. The bearish man was hacking his victim to death—one limb at a time. It was not faked. Of that Mosely had no doubt. A deep depression came over him as he watched. It was beyond revulsion. The fact that such a thing could be suffered to exist. That a film could be made of it. It said more than he ever wanted to know about the depravity loose in the world. A slow boiling anger came over him.
Was that man butchered just for this goddamned film? Fuck you, Sobol! Fuck you! Go ahead, read my mind, asshole!
Mosely kept shutting his eyes momentarily as the machete came down. Two chops to sever the right arm at the socket. One for the left arm, as the torso fell forward over the legs…

He couldn’t face it anymore. Mosely was breathing rapidly. The sounds were horrible. He couldn’t escape them. Then just as suddenly they stopped.

Mosely opened his eyes to blackness.

What followed was a seemingly endless procession of violent scenarios—some more disturbing than others. In one, a man beat a woman bloody, when suddenly another man rushed in to attack the first—while the injured woman fled. Then there were scenes of men fighting each other—with fists, then knives, then guns. Then children fighting. Then adults attacking children. Women attacking women. There were street fights, ritualized duels, senseless accidents, electrocutions. Then sadomasochistic brutality. Erotically charged violence. Followed close on by violence against animals. It all looked entirely too real. The languages of the people in the films were mostly foreign, but the images had the raw, uncut look of a digital video shot as it happened.

Mosely’s emotions ranged all over the map and frequently conflicted. He found himself tensing with righteous anger, then becoming aroused, then repulsed, and everything in between. Subtle differences in the interaction of those on-screen brought about shocking differences in his feelings even regarding similar events.

He couldn’t guess how many hours had gone by. He felt as though he’d spent a tour of duty on the front lines. His mind was bursting with horrific images, and he was nearing the limit of his endurance for violence. As the hours crept by, the themes kept changing, but slowly, imperceptibly. Previous themes sometimes returned. Families changed to images of faraway places and cultures, then images of poverty, then of wealth, then of weddings, then of funerals. Cars crashing together in intersections—apparently from fixed traffic cameras. A nonstop procession of highway carnage and death. People committing suicide in protest, burning themselves alive. Then people dying in accidents while doing adventurous things like rock climbing or BASE jumping. More shots of adventurous people succeeding—accomplishing great feats. Then people trekking through wild lands, climbing high mountain-tops. Then of historical events—from moon landings to Khrushchev blustering. Malcolm X faded into Martin Luther King, Jr.

Mosely was emotionally and physically exhausted. And still it went on.

It was like being dragged over an emotional washboard. Mosely wound up feeling virtually every emotion of which humans are capable—not once but hundreds of times. He was long past his breaking point—not that he even noticed he’d passed it.

The images continued. An unknowable number of hours, and still the images continued. Mosely’s mouth was parched, and he strained to stay alert. The images kept coming.

But one concept had begun to form in Mosely’s mind. Like a rock slowly revealed as a wind blew away surrounding sand, Mosely was starting to see himself. With all his built-up emotional defenses long since worn away, simple truths had begun to emerge. Even he knew their meaning: he was angry at his wasted life. He felt deep feelings of loss that he had no family as a child, and that he had not provided one for his son—wherever he was now. Also Mosely had a desperate desire to belong. To matter. To stand for something besides himself. He was the perennial outsider looking in on the fellowship of others.

The last films were pivotal. Where the earlier ones seemed to break him down to his emotional building blocks, the latter ones seemed to be building him up—filling him with joy as he saw people struggling together. Relying on each other. Sacrificing. Gratitude. Joy. Free men looking toward distant horizons. Horizons that beckoned the adventurous, hinting at danger.

The people in these films were of all races and ages, but Mosely noticed that they shared some traits in common: they were capable, they were highly motivated, and they acknowledged no limits. Danger was not a deterrent. It was life lived to its maximum. They were truly alive.

He had almost forgotten the real world existed. He did not know how long he lay there, but when the screens faded to black, it was as though he were cast into an abyss. He panted, struggling to find some reference point. His soul adrift in nothingness.

From somewhere in the darkness he heard Sobol’s voice. “Follow me, and I will help you find what you have lost. I will give your descendants a future. The past no longer exists for you.”

A light began to rise in the infinite distance.

“You are an exceptional person. I choose to have faith in you.” The soft light filled his vision.

Mosely slowly remembered that he existed as a person. He remembered his name. Charles Mosely. He felt different—as though all his sins were washed away.

Suddenly the crushing weight of exhaustion fell upon him.

Someone lifted the goggles from his head, revealing the same soft light above him. The big guy was there, nodding slowly. A metallic
chunk
sound echoed in the room, and Mosely’s limbs were suddenly free. Other hands came to ease him up.

Mosely looked and saw the other orderly in his white coat helping him up into a sitting position. Mosely felt dizzy. Weak.

The big guy leaned in. “We’re going to withdraw the needle. It will just take a second.”

The other orderly placed a cotton ball over the spot, squeezed, then withdrew the needle. He quickly taped a bandage over it.

Mosely’s dull eyes noticed his own clothing. He was wearing surgical scrubs with booties. He stared down at his feet, then looked up to face the big guy, who nodded slightly.

“The danger’s past.”

Mosely’s dry voice croaked, “How long?”

“Forty-six hours.”

A water bottle appeared next to his mouth. Mosely turned to see the other orderly extending it. Mosely took it and sipped greedily.

“Not too much.” After a few more moments they took it away.

The big guy regarded Mosely. “The fact that you’re still alive is all I need to know about you.” He extended his hand. “I’m Rollins.” His eyes darted. “He’s Morris.”

Mosely regarded the hand. “Like I’m Taylor?”

Rollins laughed. “Exactly like that.”

Mosely shook his hand. Rollins made eye contact. They were confident eyes, not at all unfriendly.

Morris nodded and shook his hand also. “Welcome aboard.”

“Aboard
what
?”

Rollins gestured. “The Daemon chose you. You’re one of its champions now.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“You already made your choice.” He looked into Mosely’s eyes. “This is where you want to be. That’s why you’re still alive.”

Mosely absorbed the words. The images were so fresh in his mind. Breaking him down to his basic building blocks. Understanding him. Mosely understanding himself. The elation.

He realized Rollins was right.

Rollins continued. “There are no leaders here. We are all peers. And we answer directly to the Daemon—and no one else. I am your equal. And you are mine.”

Mosely wasn’t sure this was even happening. He shook his head to clear it.

Rollins patted his arm. “First, some food and rest. There’s a lot to learn, but the Daemon chose you because you’re smart. And you’ll need to be.”

N
atalie Philips paced with a laser pointer at the edge of a projection screen. The Mahogany Row conference room was dimly lit, and silhouettes of her audience were arrayed around a sizeable boardroom table. Military badges on the uniforms of some audience members reflected the light from the screen.

Her title presentation slide was up:

Viability of Daemon Construct Over Peer-to-Peer Networks

She was already addressing the group. “…the feasibility of a narrow AI scripting application distributed over a peer-to-peer network architecture to avoid core logic disruption.” She clicked to the next slide. It bore the simple words:

Distributed Daemon Viable

A murmur went through her audience.

“Our unequivocal findings are that a distributed daemon is not merely a potential threat but an inevitable one, given the standards unifying extant networked systems. In fact, we have reason to believe one of these logic constructs is currently loose in the wild.”

Much more murmuring went through the crowd.

She changed her slide again. This one depicted two sets of graphs labeled
Incidence of DDOS Attacks—All Sites Compared to Gambling/Pornography Sites.

She looked back at her audience. “A distributed denial of service (or DDOS) attack involves harnessing the power of hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of zombie computers to transmit large amounts of packets to a single target Web domain. A zombie computer is one that has been previously compromised by a malicious back door program. This could be John Q. Public’s unsecured computer sitting in the den. An army of these zombie computers is called a
botnet,
and its collective computing power can be directed to overwhelm a target, making it too busy to respond to legitimate traffic. The potential to harm an online business is obvious.

“Unlike a simple denial of service (or DOS) attack—which is launched from a single machine and thus easily blocked by an IP address—a DDOS attack comes in waves from different IP addresses coordinated to continually incapacitate the target. Likewise, the nature of the traffic can vary wildly, making it difficult to filter out garbage connection requests. In short: it is significantly more serious. Unless the attacker brags about his deeds, tracing the real source of an attack can be next to impossible.”

She wielded the laser pointer to highlight various parts of the screen. “These two charts illustrate a pattern detected four months ago in the occurrence of distributed denial of service attacks on the public Internet—both overall and as experienced separately by commercial gambling and pornography Web sites, both legal and illegal, hereafter referred to as ‘G/P sites.’

“Note the increase of approximately twelve thousand percent in the occurrence of such attacks against G/P sites during the period January through April. Contrast this with the flat-to-declining trend in DDOS attacks versus the overall population of domains.”

She changed slides to a graphical breakdown of the top international gambling and pornography domains, with call-outs indicating the crime gangs operating out of Russia, Thailand, and Belize. The graph was broken down on the x-axis by time and on the y-axis by packets per hour.

“The CIA has associated the following international crime rings with these three G/P enterprises. Their Web interests encompass tens of thousands of loosely affiliated Web sites hosted on hundreds of domains in dozens of countries. Each one of these crime gangs is a vast IT organization, and collectively they generate billions of dollars in revenue each year. Their operating units include product development, security, finance, and infrastructure support elements—they are, in effect, multinational corporations whose product lines include narco-trafficking, sexual slavery, money laundering, and extortion.”

Her graph showed that the Web assets of each individual crime ring had been attacked in a campaign of orchestrated infowar. Philips’s laser pointer cavorted as she hammered her point home. “The Russians were first in line. We estimate that roughly ten million workstations launched a Pearl Harbor–like cyber attack simultaneously from all points on the globe, beginning in mid-January and stretching through to the end of the month. This effectively brought the Russian business to a halt worldwide—making their online gambling and pornography assets unavailable to paying customers for extended periods. These were not simple smurf and fraggle attacks. The Russians appear to have tried everything, from hardware filtering to rate-limiting connections, but it didn’t put a dent in their downtime. They tried to launch new sites and migrate customers to these, but the new sites also were rapidly targeted and brought down.”

She changed to a slide of translated Internet headlines from a passel of third-world sites. They listed dozens of killings in Asia and Russia.

“This appears to have sparked a brief gang war, followed by a purge within the ranks of the gang’s IT staff. The CIA estimates several dozen related killings, but notably, all during this period, the DDOS attacks did not let up and shifted constantly to originate from new locations. The Russian enterprise did not recover until the end of January, when it was suddenly fully operational.”

She looked up at her audience. “The following cell phone conversation was intercepted by ComSat assets over the Republic of Georgia on January twenty-ninth and is a conversation between an unidentified caller and a known Russian mafia figure based in St. Petersburg, herein denoted as
Vassili.
The transcript is available over Echelon. The abstract number is listed in your presentation binder. This raw intercept comes to us compliments of Group W.” She turned to face the screen as tinny, foreign chatter came in over speakers. An instant translation appeared on the screen in a scrolling fashion as the words were uttered in Russian:

Vassili: We’re driving. Tupo [nearby person], no. Where are you? Where are you now?

Caller: Belize City.

Vassili: They are online there?

Caller: Yes, yes. They’re running perfect.

Vassili: Perfect? Since when?

Caller: Perfect, like before perfect.

Vassili: Before the attacks?

Caller: Yes, yes.

Vassili: Do they know the extent of it there?

Caller: No. Nobody knows.

Vassili: They’re angry about Tupolov, yes?

Caller: Yes. But they have their money now.

Vassili: You paid the dead American?

Caller: Yes.

Vassili: And now we’re online again?

Caller: Yes.

Vassili: [unintelligible]. They’ll be next, and we must regain market share while they are down. You know what to do?

Caller: Yes. Sobol told us.

The screen cleared and the lights came up as animated discussions filled the room. Philips called to be heard over the din. “There are additional intercepts of a similar nature, but I think this is a representative sample. The waves of attacks continued until a couple of months ago, hitting each organization in turn—and growing in ferocity—at which point they disappeared suddenly and entirely.”

One of the DOD brass spoke up, “What’s your read on all this, Doctor?”

“I think the crime gangs running online gambling and pornography have been forced to pay protection money to someone or something.”

“You conclude that from one intercept?”

“This is one of dozens of intercepts, the transcripts of which you will find in your presentation binders.”

“How much money are we talking about here?”

Philips placed the laser pointer on the nearby podium. “We have an e-mail intercept from a Thai gang that mentions a ten percent gross payment.”

“Ten percent of
gross
?”

“All online transactions. The CIA estimates worldwide revenue from online gambling and pornography at approximately seventeen billion U.S. dollars per year. In truth, no one really knows. But if we use this as a baseline and extrapolate, assuming that the Daemon has—”

“You’re talking about a couple
billion
dollars a year.”

“There is anecdotal evidence that these payments represent an outsourcing of the IT security function of these criminal gangs to some unknown entity.” She paused, either for effect or to gather her courage—even she wasn’t sure which. “We suspect that the entity is not a living person but a massively parallel logical construct. I believe it’s Sobol’s Daemon.”

The room erupted in talk for several moments until someone in the back shouted over the din, “How do you know it’s not just another gang?”

The noise died down to hear her response.

Philips nodded. “Because that was the first thing the Russians thought. Quite a few hackers died at their hands in an effort to identify those responsible. At some point the Russians were presented with evidence that convinced them no living person was behind this attack. We don’t know yet what that evidence was—but we have operatives attempting to get their hands on it.”

The division chief just looked at her. “This is reckless conjecture. We’ve got Detective Sebeck convicted and on death row, Cheryl Lanthrop dead, and Jon Ross on the run. This situation is under control.”

The most senior NSA suit spoke. “I disagree. Right now the media is stoking a panic on cyber crime. A public discovery that Sobol’s Daemon was preying on Internet business could spook the financial markets.”

A visiting analyst from the FBI Cyber Division shook his head. “The facts don’t support the media panic, sir. Overall reported incidents of computer break-ins this year are down slightly—not up. In fact, we could spin the demise of gambling and pornography sites as a positive.”

Philips regarded the FBI agent, then turned to the room in general. “Anyone have anything on the media’s current fascination with cyber security? Does anyone know what’s driving it?”

“Sebeck’s trial?”

The FBI analyst began to hold court on the topic. “The government has few real controls over either the Internet or private data networks. This manufactured panic is addressing an actual deficiency in the cyber infrastructure. It’s the invisible hand of the market in action.”

Philips looked impassively at him. “Unless it’s already too late.”

The NSA section chief raised an eyebrow. “Is your copycat Daemon up to something more than demanding tribute from pornographers, Dr. Philips?”

She revealed no emotion. “For one, I believe it
is
Sobol’s Daemon.”

“Highly unlikely.” The FBI analyst looked ready to disprove anything. He just needed fresh grist for his logic mill.

Philips continued. “Gentlemen, there are loose ends all over the Sobol case. There’s the poisoning death of Lionel Crawly—the voice-over artist for Sobol’s game
Over the Rhine
. What dialogue did he record that we have no knowledge of? The introduction of a strange edifice in Sobol’s online game
The Gate
at almost the instant of his death. And then there are the back doors in his games—”

“There
are
no back doors in his games.” The FBI analyst scanned the faces in the room. “It’s a fact.”

The NSA chief kept his eyes on Philips. “Your Internet traffic analysis was interesting, Doctor, but if you have evidence linking Sobol’s Daemon with the Daemon attacking G/P sites, then where is it?”

“In Sobol’s game maps.”

“Steganography? Didn’t you explore that last year?”

“Fleetingly—before Sebeck’s arrest. But let’s not forget that Sobol was an extraordinarily intelligent man. He was able to envision multiple axes simultaneously.”

“Is that a polysyllabic way to say he thinks outside the box?”

A senior cryptanalyst nearby removed his glasses and started cleaning them. “No offense, Dr. Philips, but if Sobol’s games contained steganographic content, you should have readily detected it by plotting the magnitude of a two-dimensional Fast Fourier Transform of the bit-stream. This would show telltale discontinuities at a rate roughly above ten percent.”

Philips aimed an anti-smile in his direction. “Thank you, Doctor. Had I not spent the last six years expanding the frontiers of your discipline, I’m sure I would find your input invaluable.”

The division chief cleared his throat. “The point is still valid, Doctor. How could Sobol hide a back door in a program using steganography, of all things? Doesn’t that just hide data? You can’t execute steganographic code.”

The FBI analyst couldn’t hold back. “Even if he was storing encrypted code within art asset files, he’d still need code to extract the encrypted elements—and we would have found the extraction routines in the source.”

Philips turned to him thoughtfully. “Yes, but the back door isn’t in the code. It’s in the
program
—but it’s not in the code.”

Her audience looked confused.

The division chief shrugged. “You lost me there, Doctor.”

The senior cryptanalyst offered, “You mean the relationship of things
within
the program?”

“Ah, now you’re seeing it.”

The division chief cut in. “What brought you back to the stego angle? The DDOS attacks on G/P sites?”

“No.” She paused again. “Jon Ross brought me back to it.” She turned back to face them. “For the last several weeks I have been exchanging e-mail communications with the man known as Jon Ross.”

The impact of this revelation left her audience stunned briefly. Then there was frantic movement; previously untouched presentation binders were grabbed and thumbed through hastily.

“Why weren’t we informed of this?”

The NSA chief interjected, “The Advisory Panel was informed.”

“What evidence do you have that these e-mails are authentic?”

Philips was calm. “The first e-mail made reference to a conversation Ross and I had in person at Sobol’s funeral.”

The FBI analyst nodded slowly. “No doubt he claims innocence and that the Daemon really exists.”